Definition
Latin: "He took and carried away." A formal Latin phrase used in historical common law pleading to allege the wrongful taking and removal of personal property. It appeared in two distinct procedural contexts:
1. Trespass declarations: As the operative words in a writ or declaration of trespass de bonis asportatis, charging that the defendant unlawfully took and carried away the plaintiff's goods.
2. Criminal indictments: As the standard allegation in larceny indictments, capturing the two essential physical acts of the offense — the taking (cepit) and the carrying away (asportavit).
The phrase is not a cause of action or element in modern law but a relic of formal pleading, retained historically because the precise Latin words carried legal weight under the common law writ system.
Common Confusion
Cepit et asportavit is sometimes loosely equated with cepit alone, but the two were not interchangeable. Cepit — "he took" — was the word used in writs concerning living things, such as cattle or villains (serfs), where the act of seizure was the gravamen. Cepit et asportavit was reserved for dead or inanimate things — goods and chattels — where both the taking and the removal were required to complete the wrong. Burrill notes a third variant, cepit et abcariavit, as a different form of the same expression. Researchers encountering these terms in historical writs should not assume they are synonymous.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is a diagnostic marker. Its presence in a historical document — a writ, declaration, or indictment — tells the researcher what kind of action is being brought and what procedural rules applied. For corpus researchers, several points are worth noting:
First, the phrase bridges two bodies of law that modern researchers tend to keep separate: civil trespass and criminal larceny. In early common law, the line between these was not as sharp as it later became, and the shared language reflects that overlap. A document using cepit et asportavit may be either civil or criminal, and context must be examined carefully.
Second, the phrase disappeared from practice as code pleading and then notice pleading replaced common law forms. Searching for this term in sources after the mid-nineteenth century will generally yield historical commentary or scholarly discussion rather than live pleading. In American jurisdictions, Field Code reform (New York, 1848) began the displacement of Latin pleading forms; in England, the Judicature Acts of the 1870s completed it.
Third, the distinction between cepit (for living things) and cepit et asportavit (for inanimate goods) reflects a structural feature of the old writ system that is easy to miss when reading pleading manuals in isolation. Researchers working through Fitzherbert's Natura Brevium — cited by Burrill — will encounter both forms and need to hold this distinction clearly.
Fourth, for larceny research specifically: the asportavit element (carrying away) had real doctrinal content. How far a thief had to move goods to satisfy asportavit was a genuine question in criminal law, litigated well into the nineteenth century and relevant to understanding what courts meant when they cited this phrase in later commentary.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's and Burrill's agree on the core meaning and dual use (trespass and larceny), and both cite Blackstone's Commentaries at the same passage (4 Bl. Comm. 231) as the authoritative reference. Burrill adds useful precision that Black's omits: the restriction of the phrase to writs concerning dead (inanimate) things, the citation to Fitzherbert's Natura Brevium for the writ practice, and the variant form cepit et abcariavit with a citation to Townsend's Pleader.
Neither dictionary explains the substantive doctrine of asportavit — how courts measured the sufficiency of the carrying away. For that, researchers must move beyond the dictionary shelf to Blackstone himself and to the common law treatises on criminal law (East's Pleas of the Crown, Hawkins's Pleas of the Crown) where the question received sustained attention.
Both sources treat this as a historical term even from their own vantage points, signaling that by the time of their compilation it was already primarily an object of legal archaeology rather than active practice.
Jurisdictional Note
The phrase derives from English common law and was transplanted with it to American colonies and early states. Its use in American pleading tracked English practice until code pleading reforms eliminated formal Latin forms state by state beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. Researchers should not expect to find the phrase in American pleadings after roughly 1870 except in jurisdictions slow to adopt reform, or in appellate opinions discussing the sufficiency of older indictments.